Trudeau Must Apologise for Hijab Hoax

On Friday, January 12, an 11-year old girl alleged that a man cut her hijab. Within hours of the initial report, Toronto District School Board shepherded the girl and her family to the world's media form. At 1 pm on the same day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supported her by condemning the “attacker”, without evidence to support the claim of attack. This so called “Asian attacker”, it turns out, never existed.

As the Prime Minister said, “Canada is an open and welcoming country”. This openness and welcome spirit cannot be served by - and must not be a pretext for - stirring up racial tensions and disputes among communities, as Trudeau just did. I am an Asian. I demand an apology from the Prime Minister.

For Trudeau attempted to score cheap political points in a phantom instance of communal violence by tearing open some very real and deepest racial wounds in Canada's history. In 1885 Canada collected head tax from Chinese immigrants; from 1941 to 1949 ethnic Japanese were sent to internment camps; in entire neighborhoods; in North Vancouver today, in 2018, blatantly racist language stays on property titles that tell "Asiatics" not to join these neighborhoods except as servants. And then last week, our leader found it all too convenient to slander "Asians" to polish his credentials as an open-minded, racially tolerant leader - the irony is only too bitter for racial minorities to swallow.

Even without the protection of Trudeau's self-righteous rage about an "Asian" assaulting a little Muslim girl, Muslims have been living in China for almost 1400 years since the Tang dynasty. Today, Muslim population in China rivals the entire Canadian population. Conversely, the Middle East is home to millions of Chinese. And in Canada, while English and French were early settlers in this land, I've found neighbors of European ancestry welcoming of immigrants of all religious backgrounds and from all over the world. Stories of racial strife increasingly appear to be staged by politicians like Trudeau than witnessed and experienced by the people themselves.

For his political profiteering from a piece of unfounded reportage that hurts Muslims and Asians, Trudeau must apologize to the country.